Look to Look

October 6, 2023

Back when I created the first Sleuthhounds: The Unlocked Room I incorporated two main interaction options for players. The first was the ubiquitous “Use”, which allowed Homes to actively do stuff like open doors, move planks of wood, take items and so on. I also incorporated a dedicated “Look” option so that players could examine hotspots in the environment to get more information and clues.

At that time, every possible interaction in the game was uniquely scripted, which resulted in quite a lot of dialog even for shorter games. One difficulty with this was that it frequently wasn’t easy to write meaningful, distinct responses for both a Use and a Look option. It seemed kind of pointless to have a Look command if it was, broadly speaking, only going to provide the same detail as the Use command or just reiterate what players could see from the artwork itself.

As work progressed on Sleuthhounds: Cruise, it became apparent that as much dialog as there had been in the earlier games, it would pale next to Cruise if I wrote unique responses for everything. This resulted in several cost saving measures, including removing the ability to use one inventory item on another, which was needed exactly once in Cruise, and introducing generic responses when trying things unnecessary to the game (I totally get why adventure games in the 90’s went this route now).

One other element I streamlined out of existence was the Look option. Taking the Look out and leaving only Use essentially halved the number of interactions in the game at a stroke. That said, there were a few instances where removing Look made interacting with the game both inconsistent and cumbersome.

The problem I had in Cruise is that Homes and Ampson collect a number of documents in their inventory as the game progresses. With these, there’s a need to view them in close-up to see the specific details on them. Removing the dedicated Look meant that clicking on these items in the inventory had to bring up the close-up view, because there was no way to differentiate between trying to use these “readables” in the environment like a normal inventory item versus trying to see the close-up.

In one particular case, there was a readable that needed to allow for both a Look and a Use. The solution, which I never liked, was to watch for a certain condition happening in the game to change how clicking on the readable would work. Prior to this condition, clicking on it would function as a Look. After this condition, clicking on the item would then allow it to be used in the environment. Again, inconsistency, which we’ve already established is bad.

This has been rattling away at the back of my mind for a while now. It recently came to the forefront when I completed a full playthrough of Cruise, the first time I’ve done that in nearly three years. During that playthrough, I found that I didn’t miss having the ability to look at items in the environment. However, there were multiple times I did want to do a Look on the items in my inventory.

Check out those cool new Look buttons.

By the time I reached the end of the playthrough, I knew I wanted to reinstate the Look command for the inventory items. The solution to that was readily apparent. I’ve now added dedicated Look mini-buttons to each of the inventory item slots. It’s still easy to grab an inventory item for use in the environment, but now the option is present to examine everything in the inventory. It means having to write a few more dialog lines for all those looks, but it’s a small amount compared to adding a Look to every single hotspot in the game.

The benefits are many. From describing which keys the Sleuthhounds have collected on their keyrings to providing subtle hints and clues to how items can be used, the new Look options allow for much more flexibility in how the inventory can be interacted with. And that weird readable that needs to be both usable and lookable? Well, that was pretty much the first thing I fixed. No more inconsistency here!

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